FSF Statement on SCO vs. IBM

tomdp writes "Eben Moglen, Law professor and general counsel for the Free Software Foundation, has written a statement about SCO's lawsuit against IBM."

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[Dubber]

An exact copy in case fsf gets /.'ed
What? Oh...
-dubber :-)'

FSF Statement on SCO v. IBM
Eben Moglen
June 25, 2003

The lawsuit brought by the Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) against IBM has generated many requests for comment by FSF. The Foundation has refrained from making official comments on the litigation because only the plaintiff's allegations have been reported; comment on unverified allegations would ordinarily be premature. More disturbing than the lawsuit itself, however, have been public statements by representatives of SCO, which have irresponsibly suggested doubts about the legitimacy of free software overall. These statements require response.

SCO's lawsuit asserts that IBM has breached contractual obligations between the two companies, and also that IBM has incorporated trade secret information concerning the design of the UNIX operating system into what SCO calls generally ``Linux.'' This latter claim has recently been expanded in extra-judicial statements by SCO employees and officers to include suggestions that ``Linux'' includes material copied from UNIX in violation of SCO's copyrights. An allegation to this effect was contained in letters apparently sent by SCO to 1500 of the world's largest companies warning against use of free software on grounds of possible infringement liability.

It is crucial to clarify certain confusions that SCO's spokesmen have shown no disposition to dispel. In the first place, SCO has used ``Linux'' to mean ``all free software,'' or ``all free software constituting a UNIX-like operating system.'' This confusion, which the Free Software Foundation warned against in the past, is here shown to have the misleading consequences the Foundation has often predicted. ``Linux'' is the name of the kernel most often used in free software systems. But the operating system as a whole contains many other components, some of them products of the Foundation's GNU Project, others written elsewhere and published under free software licenses; the totality is GNU, the free operating system on which we have been working since 1984. Approximately half GNU's components are copyrighted works of the Free Software Foundation, including the C-compiler GCC, the GDB debugger, the C library Glibc, the bash shell, among other essential parts. The combination of GNU and the Linux kernel produces the GNU/Linux system, which is widely used on a variety of hardware and which taken as a whole duplicates the functions once only performed by the UNIX operating system.

SCO's confusing use of names makes the basis of its claims unclear: has SCO alleged that trade secrets of UNIX's originator, AT&T--of which SCO is by intermediate transactions the successor in interest--have been incorporated by IBM in the kernel, Linux, or in parts of GNU? If the former, there is no justification for the broad statements urging the Fortune 1500 to be cautious about using free software, or GNU programs generally. If, on the other hand, SCO claims that GNU contains any UNIX trade secret or copyrighted material, the claim is almost surely false. Contributors to the GNU Project promise to follow the Free Software Foundation's rules for the project, which specify--among other things--that contributors must not enter into non-disclosure agreements for technical information relevant to their work on GNU programs, and that they must not consult or make any use of source code from non-free programs, including specifically UNIX. The Foundation has no basis to believe that GNU contains any material about which SCO or anyone else could assert valid trade secret or copyright claims. Contributors could have made misrepresentations of fact in their copyright assignment statements, but failing willful misrepresentation by a contributor, which has never happened so far as the Foundation is aware, there is no significant likelihood that our supervision of the freedom of our free software has failed. The Foundation notes that despite the alarmist statements SCO'